Hunting Luka Magnotta - the fifth estate

In 2011 virtually no one knew anything about a young man named Luka Magnotta. Then came the horrifying discovery of the body of Jun Lin in Montreal, followed by a feverish international manhunt and then the arrest in Berlin. Luka Magnotta now stands charged with the murder of the young Concordia University student from China.

The name Luka Magnotta seemed to appear from nowhere in May of 2012. But if he was unknown to the wider public, for 18 months before his arrest, he was being tracked... by a group of Internet users who were horrified over videos they believed he'd made, which depicted the killing of kittens and apparent threats to do worse. In an exclusive interview with Mark Kelley, the online investigators share for the first time the details their attempts to chase Magnotta down through the deep web and alert authorities as they tried to stop a man they considered dangerous.

The hundreds of cryptic online postings Luka Magnotta uploaded to the web paint an unsettling psychological portrait of a disturbed young man who shocked the world to its core, and reveal much about his life growing up as Eric Newman. But Magnotta would disclose much more to the few people who knew him personally, two of whom share their stories exclusively with the fifth estate. What became apparent to everyone who knew him is that Magnotta appeared to have an obsessive narcissistic need to be noticed, and exhibited increasingly erratic, possibly threatening behaviour online, ringing alarm bells for those who knew him and watched his chilling story unfold.

Original Airdate : November 30th, 2012